The Database

The database contains details of 345 book reviews, and 1370 articles -
where some "articles" are in fact short paragraphs extracted from
longer pieces on miscellaneous topics. It is intended to help
researchers identify potential items of interest, and locate them
quickly in the closely-printed pages of the bound Athenaeum volumes.

The database contents can be summarised in the following way:

All records contain the relevant Date, Issue-number,
Page-number and, if applicable, Section of the
Athenaeum. Many reviews and articles have a Heading; where
several short items come under the same heading each is identified
by a Paragraph-number.

The main indication of subject-matter is given by the Title
and Topic fields (for reviews and articles respectively). Topic
fields may include short quotations from and summaries of the text of the
article. All records are assigned one or more controlled-language
Category terms, broadly based on the UDC classification scheme.
Where particular Persons and / or Institutions are
referred to, their names are also recorded in a separate field.

Normal bibliographic details: Author, Editor,
Translator, etc. are provided for book reviews. For articles, the
published Source of its material is recorded if mentioned in the
Athenaeum, and sometimes also its type or Form, e.g. whether it is
a Letter, Obituary, or report of a Lecture or
Demonstration which took place on a particular Date.

Most review and articles were anonymous, but
the Contributor's
name or initials are noted wherever they appear. From June 1830 onwards,
contributor information is also provided by the Editor's Mark,
transcribed from the official marked copy of the Athenaeum currently held
in City University library.

Search Facilities

The database my be searched in two different ways:

The Free-text search will attempt
to match any word or phrase entered by the user with
any part of the Athenaeum record. The search may be
case-sensitive or not, and may cover articles, reviews, or both.

The Single-field search allows
searching on complete terms or names from the indexed fields:
Category, Institution, Author, Person and
Source. The user may choose to see a complete alphabetic list
of terms occurring in each of these fields, and select any entry in
the list to search the database.

The result of any search is a single HTML page containing matching items
in full: there is no overview hitlist. The retrieved records
will contain links to all Issue numbers, Category terms,
Institution, Person, and Author and Source
names, any of which can be selected to trigger off a further (single-field)
search. It thus becomes possible to navigate through the database by
following links rather than entering new queries.

It is expected that most searches will be carried out as a preliminary to
consulting the Athenaeum volumes, so the records are presented in a
compressed format for ease of downloading and printing. The complete
database, and the individual records, are relatively small, so searches
will normally produce a document of manageable size, but an output limit
is set for the free-text search, where queries may occasionally match a
large number of irrelevant items.

Any problems with the search facilities should be reported to:
Susan Jones.